Isn’t it weird? There are all these clueless people telling people like me what we’re thinking, and getting it so wrong. Just this morning, Ken Ham announced…
Secularists are fearful of @ArkEncounter cause they don't want people hearing the Christian worldview they're vehemntly intolerant of
— Ken Ham (@aigkenham) April 7, 2016
Secularists are fearful of @ArkEncounter cause they don’t want people hearing the Christian worldview they’re vehemntly intolerant of
That must be why atheists encourage people to read the Bible. It must be why I and 300 atheists visited the Creation “Museum” several years ago. We’re not afraid of Christianity, we think it’s foolish: there’s a difference, you know. I’m planning to visit the Giant Fake Ark myself once it’s opened to the public, because I think informed criticism is the most powerful kind of criticism there is.
As for this nonsense about not wanting to hear the Christian worldview…we’re soaking in it right now. It’s everywhere. Christians distribute Bibles at my college, they come up and knock on my door to tell me about Jesus (well, once…then they stop coming around. Those poor Jehovah’s Witnesses looked terrified when I told them who I was.) There’s no fear involved. It’s more of a disgusted resignation, and a determination to correct the bullshit when it flows.
And then Dave Futrelle finds a completely different example of weird-ass projection! There’s this word that gets thrown around a lot by people of a certain mindset. It’s been flung at me many times. Recently it’s become the go-to insult of choice for the alt-right set.
That word is “cuck”.
It’s a very strange word, because every time people have used it against me, they act as if it’s some great triumph, as if they have somehow found the label that perfectly describes my mind-set. In reality, it leaves me baffled. “Why are you using the in-group buzzword that places you firmly in the category of racist asshat,” I think. It’s like when I see a guy with a man-bun, and think “hipster” (except, of course, that’s not as pejorative). “Cuck” is the man-bun of the alt-right racist/sexist set.
What Futrelle found, though, is one of them explaining what he thinks it means.
“Cuck” works for the same reason that “racist” works: it is an irrational word that cannot be deconstructed with reasoning. Just as “racist” hits rightists hard because it attempts to psychopathologize the healthy preference for our own race, “cuck” is devastating to leftists because they are being described as the most humiliating kind of man possible, one who gets aroused by letting another man—or other men—have sex with his wife.
I guess I missed the part where I was devastated by the insult. Unless “devastation” is a synonym for “bemusement”? Perhaps he could follow up the devastation with a shattering “You have black friends”, and then utterly destroy me with a “You respect women’s autonomy”. “You also don’t torture small animals” — Boom! Mic drop! They’ll be mopping me off the walls!
Between these loons and Ken Ham, there are a lot of people out there with deeply twisted world-views.
Asshattery, it seems, can come in infinitely many forms.
I’m just going to sit that statement on a chair in the middle of the room and glare at it for awhile until it thinks about what it’s done and starts squirming until it dies of embarrassment and shame.
carlie @ 2: I wouldn’t bother. If it was capable of thinking to that degree it probably wouldn’t exist to begin with.
Don’t have a link offhand, but I believe more than one study has shown that atheists tend to have more knowledge of the Bible than self-declared Christians. Which is hardly surprising.
What does “cuck” normally mean?
I mean, does the word have some technical or non insult meaning? what does it literally mean?
PZ:
I’m terrified of Christianity. The reasons are far too numerous to mention, but the latest one is this:
It’s short for “cuckold”, a very old term (you’ll find reference in Chaucer) that originally was applied to a man whose spouse was having sex with other men. In modern times, the term has been applied to porn which presents a man watching his spouse have sex with another man. Often, there is a racial element, where the woman’s partner is black.
The alt-right movement has taken over this term and uses it metaphorically to describe anyone (usually a conservative) who they feel has betrayed alt-right principles by being too liberal. Often the term in this case gets portmanteaued into “cuckservative”. (As is often the case, alt-right disgust is being expressed in sexualized and racialized terms.)
cervantes 4: here’s one. http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey/
So religions that perform human sacrifice during their Black Mass are protected from homicide charges???
BRB
It’s scary, just how much irrationality is out there. And they don’t even realize.
Like Social Justice Warrior, cuck is another pejorative that leaves its victims confused, and partially bemused.
I’ve never understood why Social Justice Warrior is supposed to be pejorative. Do people not think social justice is important? Isn’t it good to fight for it?
Is it really, though? I mean, I don’t have a cuckold fetish, but even so I don’t think that’s so bad. Isn’t that “the most humiliating” sort of insult to throw at people who are ardently conservative and consider traditionalism and holy matrimony etc. to be of eternal importance? Why would “the left” be bothered too much by this insult in the first place?
See also “do-gooder”.
The sad woogums who level insults like “cuck” really need to hear Inigo Montoya: “You use that word quite often. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
@13 Saganite
Exactly — it strikes me as a case of projection combined with seriously not thinking things through. They try to insult people by calling them insufficiently Manly for the offense of being the kind of person who doesn’t care about Manliness. I mean, it works as a pejorative for use within their own group, or even mainstream society. But as an insult it’s pretty feeble.
I do enjoy being called a “do-gooder” a lot, though, I hope they keep that one.
@14 Dunc:
By that logic, does that make them Anti-Social Justice Warriors? Who claims to be against justice?!
And they would rather be known as Do-badders, maybe?
Okay, its too early in the morning for my head to be hurting like this.
@tulse
Dunc has part of it. The people using the term have to me have seemed opposed to social justice in general, or in your particular location that might happen to affect them.
The rest of it has to do with the fact that “social justice warrior” is supposed to represent a specific kind of person advocating social justice by illegitimate means (irrational, illogical…), but the wording is general, a warrior fights and fighting for social justice is what people interested in social justice have to do because of the opposition of people invested in the system. So people who don’t like social justice would instantly find a word that worked for them too.
Projection and moving attention from the person using the pejorative is also part of the point. In my experience those characteristics that are supposed to make a social justice warrior illegitimate are characteristics of the people using SJW.
@tulse #12
It’s the result of combining the pejorative”keyboard warrior” (naive person with inflated sense of self who think they’re changing the world by furious typing I comments/chats online) with “social justice activist”. Replacing activist with warrior is trying to show how activist work is absurd or futile, since the internet isn’t “real life”, social justice activism is just tilting at windmills.
At least that’s my take from when it started being used instead of the aforementioned keyboard warrior.
lakitah tolbert, @17: I’m not sure that “logic” is the appropriate term here.
I’ve never heard the term “cuck” by itself before, but I doubt that I’d be able to ever hear it in the future without breaking into some Hamilton “Say no to this”: “U-oh! You made the wrong sucker a cuckold! Now it’s time to pay for the pants you unbuckled!”
I am not a grammar Nazi, but I don’t think that one should even send out a Tweet with a stranded preposition.
Carlie @2
Yeah, I was thinking about that statement, too. Preference for one’s own race is (arguably) not inherently bigotry (usually feeds into bigotry, though). It is, however, an old human tribalist mentality with absolutely no benefit to modern society as a whole. Calling it healthy is pretty fucked up.
Come to think of it, calling preference for one’s own race “healthy” implicitly pathologizes interracial couples and bi/multi-racial individuals. It also promotes lack of genetic diversity in future generations.
Or “bleeding heart”. Though I guess at least that phrase has some internal logic to it – hearts obviously aren’t supposed to bleed, implying maybe a terminal excess of self sacrifice or something.
It just occurred to me though that part of the bite “social justice warrior” is supposed to have might have to do with the just world fallacy a lot of its users seem to indulge in. After all, if you start with an assumption that everything is already as it should be, than anyone fighting so hard for more “social justice” must be, at best, a quixotic fool, and possibly some kind of pathological social terrorist.
One of the easiest defenses in the world is to respond to reasoned criticism with “you’re just afraid of the truth.” No need to look for counter evidence or even come up with any coherent argument at all. You’ve stolen the high ground and they cower before your bravery.
I am a “tree hugger.” Sometimes. Recently, though, I’ve taken to patting the branches of my new little Japanese Maple while reassuring it that the snow and freezing temperatures must stop soon, it’s April, hang in there, poor thing.
tulse #12 wrote:
As I understand it the term “Social Justice Warrior” is not meant to slander people who fight for social justice. Fighting for social justice is noble and good — even fighting when you fight hard or with passion. Instead, a “Social Justice Warrior” is not really concerned with social justice at all. They pick fights over marginal or nonexistent issues in order to create drama and aggrandize themselves. In the process, they manage to set civil rights back instead of forward. That’s supposed to be the definition of the SJW.
Are there really people like that? We could probably scrounge around the internet and find them. Are there a LOT of people like that? Probably not, though given that it’s a pejorative it would be safe to say there are “too many.” Are YOU like that? If this is the definition being used, then your answer is going to be “no.” And then you may or may not defend the legitimacy of whatever issue may or may not have provoked someone into saying you may or may not be one.
The mildly deranged penguin points out a more effective insult is to call someone a “male penguin”. They sit on an egg in the middle of nowhere all freezing cold winter with nothing to eat, whilst the females fly off to tropical paradises for some R&R and, er, new egg making… hum… she needs to think about this a bit more…
Can I keep using “idiot” at them in response?
My problem is that there isn’t even a good definition of “race” — it wasn’t that long ago in the US that the Irish were not seen as “one of us”, and anyone from southern Italy was too “swarthy” to join the country club. Ironically enough, it is precisely because the US is such a “mongrel” nation that “race” has pretty much devolved to nothing more than “people with roughly the same amount of melanin as me”.
Huh? That … doesn’t follow and those aren’t related at all. “racist” hits hard because it psychopathologizes the “healthy preference for [his] own race”. Okay, that makes sense “racist” means “someone who thinks differently about people based on race” which accurately describes a belief and then “psychopathologizes” it by implying that that belief is beneath contempt and obviously wrong and foul. Okay.
But then “cuck” hits hard because it reflects the “lowest” sort of man? What the heck does that have to do with the beliefs of the left? It makes as little sense as “Your mother wears army boots” or “you’re ugly” or “Fatty McFat pants”? If someone resorts to such irrelevent barbs for the sake of barbs, they’ve already lost the argument.
More to the point would be a sneering “leftie” or “pinko” or “SJW”. Which, isn’t devasting because … yeah I have liberal beliefs, so? Which, to be fair, calling a Stormfronter a “racist” probably won’t be devastating to a Stormfronter either. But it does indicate a “if we can not agree that thinking different about people based on race is is simply foul, wrong, and beneath contempt then we have no common ground for discussion; I simply find you despicable” air. Which, If directed at me by alt-righter (but for leftie pinko SJW views rather than racist views) I honestly wouldn’t care. I simply do not respect their opinions.
Why not? It’s a perfectly good English construction.
The message sucks, but the grammar is nothing to be ashamed of.
Now, a true racial question would be, if one did cuckold a cuckoo, where would the young nest?
Assuming that one party were human and the other, a cuckoo.
Interestingly here, when a horse and jackass mate, a mule is produced. Whenever humans of any alleged race mate, a fertile child is produced, of either sex, obeying the sexual differentiation processes inherent in human biology.
As for the original “slight”, I’ll be totally honest, I have no fucking clue what the asshole is trying to say, as it makes dick all of sense.
Had someone had the poor grace to say that to me around my wife, once she was done laughing, she’d explain the origin of the term, what it means, what he just said about her and I’m quite certain all else would be laughing as he ran for the hills. All, while laughing and explaining precisely which class of asshole that she thought he is.
The closest that I think I can translate from assholese is, “I disagree with you, so your wife fucks around on you and you know about it”. How five year old.
No, my five year old grandkid can do far better by calling the asshole “poopypants” and likely be correct. If that’s the peak of their intellectual attainment, bowel and bladder control is unlikely.
@26 Sastra:
I find myself suspicious of this definition of SJW. Accusing someone of “creating drama” is one of the most common silencing tactics used by people with power to shut down uncomfortable conversations started by someone with less power. And most people who seriously invoke SJW as an insult are people of privilege who are ironically starting drama by getting defensive at the first whiff of any observations about their potentially harmful actions.
It literally does not matter if I am writing with a neutral voice and making simple observations, or if I’m frothing at the mouth and swearing like a sailor–any attempt to discuss social justice is inevitably met with variants on the “Dear Muslima” horseshit started by Our Favourite* Atheist.
*Your mileage may vary. /end sarcasm
I am coming to that conclusion myself. I sometimes despair at the futile hope that there must be a way to change that apparent fact and helping people to a more clear reality based world view. Something which I myself struggle with obtaining
when I was a much younger person and living with and around such irrational people I remember having the feeling of the threat from having such terms thrown at me. The fear was both a physical one of potential violence and one of being ostracized from the in group (all good society ) .
Being different from the “in-group” turns out not be what I once thought. The “in-group” I now see as extremely confining and those within it as profoundly un-free .
It does seem hopeless sometimes.
uncle frogy
Depends on who you ask. In a phenomenon loosely analogous to Greedy Reductionism, words like “idiot,” “stupid,” etc. that have no (even-sorta-vaguely-present) relation to any sort of disability have been nevertheless declared Ableist by fiat in some circles. >.>
Social Justice Warrior is a derogatory term to these wing nuts because it contains the word “social”. It’s just too darn close to “socialism”, which they equate to communism and atheism. In other words, circular logic spinning around the minds of people who are incapable of critical thought. In fact, they think “critical thinking” is defined as coming up with clever insults to spit upon those who actually are critical thinkers…and have outgrown childhood fairy tales like the ones residing in the bible.
#32, wzrd1
It comes from the sexist attitude that a man is supposed to be able to please his woman (notice the ownership overtones) so thoroughly and completely that she would never dream of straying. He has “lost control” of his woman and thus isn’t really a man.
Cuck? That makes no sense at all. The ‘cuck’ in ‘cuckold’ is from the the old French for “cukoo” – the bird who lays its eggs in other birds nests. Words! How do they work?
cuckold (n.) Look up cuckold at Dictionary.com
mid-13c., kukewald, from Old French cucuault, from cocu (see cuckoo) + pejorative suffix -ault, of Germanic origin. So called from the female bird’s alleged habit of changing mates, or her authentic habit of leaving eggs in another bird’s nest.
In Modern French the identity is more obvious: Coucou for the bird and cocu for the betrayed husband. German Hahnrei (13c.), from Low German, is of obscure origin. The second element seems to be connected to words for “ardent,” and suggests perhaps “sexually aggressive hen,” with transferal to humans, but Kluge suggests rather a connection to words for “capon” and “castrated.” Related: Cuckoldry.
cuckold (v.) Look up cuckold at Dictionary.com
1580s, from cuckold (n.). Related: Cuckolded; cuckolding.
I’ve always thought that the insult a person uses says a lot about the insulter, in that it reflects the fears the insulter may have about him/herself. If they call you stupid, they may fear they are not smart enough, and so on.
rrhain, in other words, they want a robot, not a life partner. How pathetic, both in terms of what they use to do what they call thinking and as a life aspiration.
Still, whatever we’re doing, it’s working well, as we’ve passed the 34 year mark and we’re going strong. If I want to keep her happy, I load the dishwasher for her. ;)
Whoever cooks, the other gets the dishes and I’ve cooked today, as it’s my “weekend”. :)
Still, I see the second class citizen in her medical care, where a neurosurgeon didn’t even bother with her cauda equina after not filling out the insurance company pain/dysfunction scale, but he did so for male patients. When challenged, he suggested we see another neurosurgeon, which we’ve since scheduled and our primary filled out the form to get her MRI. That I had to take issue with physicians ignoring her medical problems, while paying heavy attention to mine angered me enough to make my point plain to them that we *both* receive treatment for our ills, not one of us.
@Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y
I can see some validity in that.
But I don’t want to use “asshole” because assholes serve a function and make life livable, unlike these guys.
marcoli wrote:
If he were writing in French, I’d agree, but that prohibition doesn’t really apply to English or most other Germanic languages. Avoiding terminal prepositions would’ve only resulted in strange phrasing in this case.
Sorry, I think I missed the class on advanced political classifications. What is the “alt-right” set?
mykroft@39,
The nym someone chooses might tell you a lot about them in a similar way :-p
karellen@43,
Nazis who lack the courage to call themselves what they are.
“Cuck” like “Social Justice Warrior” has become, to me, a signal that the person saying it has zero insight on whatever they are talking about and should just be ignored/mocked.
Seriously, whenever I see some MRA/Gamergate fucknut screech the word “cuck” at someone I just giggle. It is such a silly sounding word, how can anyone really be offended by it? I always imagine a meet up of alt-rightists sounding like a barnyard. “Cuck, cuck,cuck….CUCK KAW!”
w00dview @46: Precisely! My first reaction to hearing the term “cuck” was “do they realise it makes them sound like a chicken that’s just laid an egg”? I mean, if this particular image is one which they’re happy with inspiring in the minds of their purported foes and deadly enemies, well, far be it from me to take it from them. But I have to admit, not having spent much time around hens in person, the noise they make is far from being either awe-inspiring or terrifying for me.
But then again, I tend to regard someone using “social justice warrior” or “SJW” as a perjorative as having missed the point of Insults 101 as well. I mean, you’re attempting to insult someone by calling them “a person who works toward the goal of ensuring all people are treated with decency regardless of gender, ancestry, orientation, religious background or whatever” (or more simply: a person who thinks that being polite to everyone else regardless of who they are is only reasonable). Where’s the insult in that?
For folks who are experiencing this failure to comprehend insults 101, I’d advise sticking to the tried and true ones, like “poopyhead”.